New Biking Gadget

I've mentioned in a number of posts over the past 3 months that I'm really making an effort to get my butt back into full on biking shape. Its been a number of years since I've ridden on a consistent basis, and after adding multiple bikes to my two-wheeled fleet, I am back in the saddle. 

One gadget I've had my eye on for a short while is the Garmin Edge 500 cycling computer. Now, this isn't your basic $25 computer that tell you time/speed/distance and that's it. No, this baby is for real. Similar to my Garmin watch I bought a few months back, this thing is packed to brim of features that I plan on using to the utmost of my cycling ability. Naturally it has gps navigation/tracking features, that will allow you to track your bike rides and workouts, but it will also spit out a whole slew of other data, a lot of which is still above my head, but some of the more common bits are: speed, distance, heart rate, calories, pre-planned workouts, courses, cadence, elevation, grade, power output, etc, etc.

Using the Garmin Connect website, and Garmin's desktop software, Garmin Training Center, you can dive really deep into planning your workouts and then analyzing the data afterwards. Like I said, a lot of this is still a touch over my head in terms of understanding the full capabilities and how to get the most out of all these features, but I'm learning more and more every day. After picking up the computer yesterday evening, I tinkered with it [as I naturally would with any new gadget] for about an hour before bed. One really cool feature is the computers ability to display 'courses' that you preprogram and send to the device via your computer. 

In just 65 days I'll be riding in this year's Tour de Cure for diabetes, and I'll be riding the 100 mile route. In my preparation for such a ride, I found this years actual 100 mile route listed online, which you can view for yourself here. When looking at the map that pops up, you'll see a tab called 'share' which will allow you to download various file versions of the map for sending to devices [such as, you guessed it, cycling computers.] I downloaded the .gpx file that has the entire route, and markers in it. Unfortunately, the Edge 500 doesn't recognize .gpx files [at least to my knowledge] so I did some brief research and found this nifty little site, that will convert that type of file to an array of different file types, included .crs files, which is the file type you need to import into the Garmin Training Center software, which will then allow you to send it to your device. Did you follow all of that? Good. 

At any rate, it worked flawlessly and I now have the 100 mile route for this year's Tour de Cure loaded onto the computer, which you can see in the pictures below. I won't ramble on too much longer, but needless to say, I'm very excited to finally have a true dedicated cycling computer that will undoubtedly make my riding and training more fun. If you're still curious or for some reason want to know more, I highly suggest heading over to the fitness related [and much much better] blog DC Rainmaker. That guy's blog and posts blow mine out of the water. If you have a training or fitness question, or perhaps are looking for some new fitness gadgets yourself, I guarantee you will find your answer over there. Since that's where I first read about the Edge 500, I felt it was necessary to give that blog a shout out. 

Alright, enough rambling. On with the pretty pretty pictures of my new toy. Enjoy!

Pretty tight little package for the amount of work this thing does.

Garmin makes it, in case you hadn't figured that out yet.

Self explanatory.

Got my bike's 'personal data' loaded up.

Courses loaded onto unit. [100 mile Tour de Cure]

Course map. [Notice similarity to this]

Course overview. [Preset at a 16mph pace]

Get out there and ride!